“Biret grasps the size of Beethoven’s style. The polyphony is laid out in a relaxed way with little indulgence in point making. She keeps the big line and yet is thankfully sparing in her use of fortissimos. The piano tone is sumptuous. Biret’s gentle and almost sensuous sonorities are really captivating. One is reminded that her mentor has been Wilhelm Kempff.” (Gramophone) “Idil Biret gives an impressive performance. A supreme mastery of tempi, sonorities, polyphony and technique permits Biret—a disciple of Alfred Cortot—to embrace all the moods of Beethoven and gives her playing a symphonic depth rarely heard until now.” (Le Nouvel Observateur) “Idil Biret has recently recorded Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s nine Symphonies for EMI. Her superbly authentic performance of the 5th Symphony, heard at her Herkülessaal recital in Munich, received a thunderous reception.” (Müncher Merkur)

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The fourth in Idil Biret's complete traversal of the piano works serves to reinforce this listener's earlier impressions: she is a greatly gifted and precocious Beethovenian, able to plumb the depths of the master's style, and technically brilliant in execution, if only she could avoid certain mannerisms, such as occasional excessive staccato, totally uncalled-for. She could not have learned to play in this manner from her teachers Boulanger and Cortot. The audio quality is more than adequate, but not quite the full-bodied richness found in other recordings of the same music.

Review By David Denton, Naxos,January 2009

Idil Biret’s second disc in the sonata cycle shows that she is not following the well-trodden path of so many of her predecessors where one style is made to fit all of the sonatas. Scholarly rectitude is here blown away in the opening Allegro con brio of the Third where passion takes over, and without finicky attention to details she sweeps the listener along. The second movement comes as a respite before her playful scherzo leads back to the brilliance of the opening with a lively Allegro assai taking us happily through to the end. Though in three movements, the Fifth is one of the shorter sonatas, and here Biret is initially more restrained, but takes the finale at its face value as a genuine Prestissimo. I love that feeling of wistfulness she brings to the opening of the Eighteenth, ‘a young girl lost in dreams’ is the picture she paints. The following scherzo has a youthful vivacity I miss in most recordings, while in the following Minuet Biret is capricious. Maybe not quite the ‘con fuoco’ Beethoven asks for, but the finale is suitably lively, the whole disc having the feel of youthful spontaneity. It augers well for the following albums, but why has this peculiar disc numbering system been adopted?

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